1 Corinthians 13
13
The way of perfection — love
1-11And the way I will show you is the way of perfection. I may have knowledge, but it is still fragmentary, I read as it were on a mirror the reflections which I cannot yet quite make out. I prophesy partially, not fully and perfectly, and so is it with other gifts of the kind, tongues and healing and so on. These are, as it were, but the infancy of the Spirit, its first faint babblings and lispings, but love is full, complete, perfect. Here and now it is the all-inclusive, towards which all these other gifts point, and when love is fully come, there will be an end of these partial utterances of the Spirit. Therefore love is above all things necessary. What are all these other gifts without it? What is the speaking with tongues, the utterances of men or angels, without it? Merely a repetition of the old religions with the clashing of cymbals and beating of gongs. And what does it avail to prophesy, to have an intellect which can grapple with all mysteries and knowledge, and to have so powerful a faith as to be able to work miracles with it, if love is not the crown, the aim, the end of it all? It is all worthless. And to give away all your possessions without love, and to embrace martyrdom and the stake without love — how empty, how vain and worthless! For love includes all that is good — all patience, kindness, tolerance, forbearance, faith and hope; and love is antidote to all evil, all jealousy, and boasting, all ugliness, selfishness, ill-temper, evil thinking. Love can never take any pleasure in these things, the joy of love comes from truth. And so it shall come to pass that all other things will change, pass, and be no more, but love will remain. All that is partial, imperfect, incomplete must have an end, but love will never fail. 12In that perfect day of love we shall see face to face, we shall know then as now we are known, 13and though now we see faith, hope and love, these three, abiding with us, the greatest of them is love.
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Translated in 1916, published in 1937.
1 Corinthians 13
13
1If with the tongues of men and of messengers I speak, and have not love, I have become brass sounding, or a cymbal tinkling;
2and if I have prophecy, and know all the secrets, and all the knowledge, and if I have all the faith, so as to remove mountains, and have not love, I am nothing;
3and if I give away to feed others all my goods, and if I give up my body that I may be burned, and have not love, I am profited nothing.
4The love is long-suffering, it is kind, the love doth not envy, the love doth not vaunt itself, is not puffed up,
5doth not act unseemly, doth not seek its own things, is not provoked, doth not impute evil,
6rejoiceth not over the unrighteousness, and rejoiceth with the truth;
7all things it beareth, all it believeth, all it hopeth, all it endureth.
8The love doth never fail; and whether [there be] prophecies, they shall become useless; whether tongues, they shall cease; whether knowledge, it shall become useless;
9for in part we know, and in part we prophecy;
10and when that which is perfect may come, then that which [is] in part shall become useless.
11When I was a babe, as a babe I was speaking, as a babe I was thinking, as a babe I was reasoning, and when I have become a man, I have made useless the things of the babe;
12for we see now through a mirror obscurely, and then face to face; now I know in part, and then I shall fully know, as also I was known;
13and now there doth remain faith, hope, love — these three; and the greatest of these [is] love.
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maintained by the British and Foreign Bible Society